This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Community: Knowledge & Support

Further insight into the pathophysiology of MS was provided by Eduard Rindfleisch, a 19th century German pathologist, who analysed post-mortem brain samples from MS patients.

In 1863, Rindfleisch reported a key finding that paved the way for theories of inflammatory involvement in the aetiology of MS. He noticed that, consistently in all the specimens, a blood vessel was present at the centre of each lesion. His illustrations of the plaques are seen in the slide.

Rindfleisch wrote:
"If one looks carefully at freshly altered parts of the white matter ... one perceives already with the naked eye a red point or line in the middle of each individual focus,.. the lumen of a small vessel engorged with blood ... All this leads us to search for the primary cause of the disease in an alteration of individual vessels and their ramifications; All vessels running inside the foci, but also those which traverse the immediately surrounding but still intact parenchyma are in a state characteristic of chronic inflammation." [/b]

I'm sorry, but why the hell has it taken so long?

Kuhnian paradigm shifts

An epistemological paradigm shift was called a scientific revolution by epistemologist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. It is based on features of landscape of knowledge that scientists can identify around them. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change). Rather, according to Kuhn, anomalies have various levels of significance to the practitioners of science at the time. To put it in the context of early 20th century physics, some scientists found the problems with calculating Mercury's perihelion more troubling than the Michelson-Morley experiment results, and some the other way around. Kuhn's model of scientific change differs here, and in many places, from that of the logical positivists in that it puts an enhanced emphasis on the individual humans involved as scientists, rather than abstracting science into a purely logical or philosophical venture.

When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm. Again, for early 20th century physics, the transition between the Maxwellian electromagnetic worldview and the Einsteinian Relativistic worldview was neither instantaneous nor calm, and instead involved a protracted set of "attacks," both with empirical data as well as rhetorical or philosophical arguments, by both sides, with the Einsteinian theory winning out in the long-run. Again, the weighing of evidence and importance of new data was fit through the human sieve: some scientists found the simplicity of Einstein's equations to be most compelling, while some found them more complicated than the notion of Maxwell's aether which they banished. Some found Eddington's photographs of light bending around the sun to be compelling, some questioned their accuracy and meaning. Sometimes the convincing force is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn said, using a quote from Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

After a given discipline has changed from one paradigm to another, this is called, in Kuhn's terminology, a scientific revolution or a paradigm shift. It is often this final conclusion, the result of the long process, that is meant when the term paradigm shift is used colloquially: simply the (often radical) change of worldview, without reference to the specificities of Kuhn's historical argument.

For clarification, did Rindfleisch report that all lesions were around veins (as you say, cheer), or around vessels in general. In any theory, one would expect them to be around vessels as this is where the rest of the body comes in contact with the brain. However them being around veins points to the specific theory of CCSVI.

In once more providing unmistakable pictorial evidence on the venous conditioning of cerebral multiple sclerosis, Charles E. Lumsden, in 1970, observed that in the brainstem as well multiple sclerosis-specific plaques consistently originate on veins. Specific pons lesions were accordingly shown to equally evolve as vein-dependent "Dawson-fingers" (71).
The results of Colin W. Adams' researches into the development of cerebral multiple sclerosis, on the other hand, led to a fresh realization of the fact that "the early stage of the periventricular plaque is the formation of a lesion around a subependymal vein" (1). Besides thus confirming that the changes definitively set out from veins running underneath the cerebral ventricular lining, Adams again found the lesion spread into the periphery of the cerebral hemispheres to be consistently related to the course of particular veins. The fluid inside the cerebral ventricles was accordingly not felt to play a part in the specific lesion developments (2).

But this has been know for years.

There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with

Cheer mentioned that yes it has, and it is one of those things mentioned in Fernando's piece:

"It seems that even now this debate has not settled, leaving room for a steady stream of eccentric proposals. An Austrian doctor has made available an electronic version of his critical analysis of contemporary concepts on the aetiology of MS suggesting that the perivenous lesions are caused by a widening of venus formina in the skulls of affected individuals. We find this hypothesis less than compelling and are sparing our readers further details or advertisement of the website."

I think it's a duck ...

Cheer , you are loaded for bear tonite . And with good reason.

So I'm staying behind this big old tree until you get back in the truck!




Mr. Success